August Town, Papine and university towns
PERHAPS THE most frightening statistic to emerge at the recent forum hosted by this newspaper on the St Andrew community of August Town wasn’t the number of murders there so far this year, which, at 13, is by any measure phenomenally high. Rather, it is the community’s illiteracy rate.
According to Olivine Burke, a University of the West Indies (UWI) social scientist, who quoted a report of the Government’s Social Development Commission (SDC), 60 per cent of August Town’s residents couldn’t read and write or are not numerate to a level to proficiently function in society. Even if that ratio was discounted by, say, 50 percentage points, to make allowance for the age of a report, errors and omissions, and changed circumstances, what is left would be still scary.
In the event, at either 60 per cent or 30 per cent illiteracy, the figures give credence to another claim made during the forum: that high-school dropouts who have resorted to lives of crime manipulate their ignorant counterparts to engage in violent acts, including reprisals between gangs, of which, according to the head of the police in the area, there are at least 30.
“The gang situation in August Town is at a very serious level at this time,” lamented Superintendent Keith Steele.
There are some important contextual observations to be made about August Town. It’s considered an inner-city community with perhaps 7,000 residents, which you might expand to 10,000, or, to be expansive, 12,000, if you widen the definition of August Town to include satellite areas. At the lower level, August Town’s homicide rate, thus far in 2018, would be 130 per 100,000, or nearly four times the current national average. At the higher population level, the homicide would be around 108/100,000.
Significantly, August Town, quite literally, is adjacent to the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies as has been the case since the university started 70 years ago. Indeed, the university, as Dr Burke observed last week, does social work in the community for young people to ‘unlearn’ generations of antisocial behaviour.
“What we are looking at through our programme is to build the capacity of persons so that they can take over, in two generations or so, the leadership of the community in order that we can transform it,” she said.
The UWI is not the only university that August Town has as a relatively near neighbour. To the north, in Papine, is the University of Technology (UTech), which, in its previous incarnation, was the College of Arts, Science and Technology. Just up the road from UTech is a technical and vocational education and training institution run by the government training agency, HEART Trust/NTA.
SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP
At least two larger issues flow from these observations. One is that given its neighbourhood, how could August Town, and for that matter other communities, be allowed to come to this. In most other places where universities exist, there is a symbiotic relationship between the institutions and their host communities, exemplified in the development of so-called university towns whose populations tend to be better educated than others and whose economies are influenced by, or linked to, the institutions.
Often, business start-ups are the outgrowth of research and development projects originated in unversities. Think of the industries that are strong in the cities of Oxford and Cambridge in Britain, or those that flourish in Boston because of Harvard and MIT.
In our case, the universities and other tertiary institutions have no such transformational impact on their immediate surroundings. And not just August Town. Take Papine. Its market, across the road from UTech at one side, and the UWI teaching hospital at another, is a dump. Its square is strewn with garbage. There is no sense of order.
Two decades ago when he was local government minister, Arnold Bertram talked of transforming Papine into the kind of genteel university town for which we long. We hope it happens there, as well as in other communities. But another two generations will be a hell of wait.